The Ontario Celebration of Women in Computing (ONCWIC) conference was created by the School of Computing’s Women in the School of Computing (WISC) group, and held for the first time in Kingston in 2010. The conference has since grown as it traveled to other universities across the province (Toronto, Western, Waterloo). Its fifth edition was held recently in Guelph, and we share with you the report below prepared by our own Wendy Powley, founder of ONCWIC.
The annual WISC roadtrip to the Ontario Celebration of Women in Computing (ONCWIC 2014) conference took place on October 24/25th. The conference was held by (and at) the University of Guelph. This is an exciting event for our group as we were the founders of the conference in 2010 (Since then the conference has been run annually with a different university hosting each year). Queen’s School of Computing was well represented at the conference by 60 enthusiastic attendees.
The conference began on Friday evening with dinner and a keynote delivered by the Honourable Liz Sandals, the Minister of Education for Ontario. Following dinner, a large number of attendees took part in a Scratch programming contest, making some very impressive games. Two groups from Queen’s won prizes – Megan Michaelis, Fiona Sinclair and Catherine Chisnel won the “Most Progressive Game” award and Katherine Beaulieu and Grace Underwood won “Most Addictive Game”.
Saturday featured a career fair, workshops on resume writing and technical interviews as well as technical talks, hands-on technical workshops using Arduino and Raspberry Pi and plenty of networking opportunities. The poster competition was won by our own Lili Wang for her PHD work on Protein-interaction-network-based Pathway Analysis. Lili will enjoy an all expense trip to the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing conference in Houston in 2015 courtesy of the ACM-W who sponsored this prize.
It is exciting to see the conference not only thriving, but expanding rapidly. We have doubled our registration (300 this year) and this year we had representation from 12 different educational institutions (plus some secondary schools) and 23 different companies, many who were sponsors and who were actively recruiting at the event.
Check out these terrific photos from the weekend!